The Problem With Affirmative Action

For the last few weeks, we've talked about the origins of the racial wealth gap. This week, we're turning our attention to one of the first major efforts to create more economic opportunity for Black Americans: Affirmative action in education. Kelsey Butler takes us to California, a place that for decades had strong, successful affirmative action measures, until one day, it didn't. She explains what getting rid of the policy meant for Black and white graduates, and why reinstating it isn't enough to close the wealth gap.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Up to now, we focused on the origins of the
racial wealth gap, how Black people have been consistently excluded
from building wealth and ensuring their own financial stability since
the end of slavery. Today, we're going to look at
one of the first attempts to address the disparities to
make America a more equal society, to level the playing field.

(00:27):
We're talking about affirmative action and education. This starts more
or less in September with an executive order that makes
new rules for federal contractors. It's not enough to not
discriminate that's already illegal. The order says it's time to
ensure no one's being left out. President Lyndon Johnson was

(00:49):
clear about his rationale here. He is speaking at graduation
at Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, d C.
You do not take a person who for a year
has been hobbled by change and liberating bringing up to
the starting line of a race, and then say you

(01:10):
are free to compete with all the others and still
justly believe that you have been completely fair. That's the
theory behind affirmative action. It was the idea that it
took work to unlock opportunity in a more equitable way.
Black people in particular were entitled to additional consideration. This

(01:31):
did two big things. One, it set aside government contracts
to minority owned businesses. It also radically changed college admissions.
Colleges and universities tweaked their admissions policies to enroll more
African Americans and other minorities. Five years after Johnson signs
that executive order, roughly of colleges and universities have some

(01:56):
kind of affirmative action in place, and black student enrollment
was going up. So in that regard, it's working, but
it's not universally popular. Far too many affirmative action programs
divide rather than unite. Our children and grandchildren feel no
responsibility for the conduct of their ancestors and the mistakes

(02:18):
of America's past, and that is as it should be.
A black California businessman named Ward Connorly waged war on
affirmative action in his state. Connorley was also a regent
in the University of California system, and he was the
driving force behind Proposition too oh nine, California ballot initiative

(02:40):
to end affirmative action in the state. That's not what
the text of the ballot initiatives said, though in fact
it didn't even mention affirmative action by name. It instead
framed it as anti discrimination section the state shall not
discriminate against or grant refferential treatment to any individual or

(03:03):
group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or
national origin in the operation of public employment, public education,
or public contracting the preferential treatment it refers to. That's
what would be the death knell for affirmative action. Connorly
acknowledged that those kinds of measures had been necessary, but

(03:26):
he argued it wasn't anymore. It had gone from being
a transitional remedy to an entitlement, a crutch that had
outlived its usefulness for black people in our reliance on
affirmative action. The time has indeed come to let go.
We cannot forever look through the rear view mirror at
America's mistakes. We must look through the windshield at its opportunities.

(03:48):
It was a radical position for a black man to take.
Civil rights groups roundly opposed the measure. Connor Ley said
he was called an uncle Tom, a lackey, and a sellout,
but he won. Prop To nine passed with of the vote,
including Connorley with later brag of the black vote. By

(04:11):
the late nineties, affirmative action in California public universities was dead.
California's is the premier laboratory for testing this experiment. If
this experiment works in California, my friends, it works anywhere.
It fails in California, its failure can be predicted throughout

(04:34):
the land. The United States was about to find out whether,
as Connorley said, the experiment worked. The data shows that
the median white family has ten times more wealth than

(04:55):
the average black family. One of the drivers of that
wealth gap is redlining. When it comes to understanding financial
inequality in this country, economists often point to the absence
of African American generational wealth. See the pleasant a plant
walk from California to Night a picture of how the

(05:15):
nation's largest university system may be transformed. Now that it's
a pervative action program is going to be ended. It's
a trend propelled not just by economic forces, but by
white racism and local white political and economic power. It's
much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is
to guarantee an annual income, for instance, to get rid

(05:36):
of poverty. Welcome back to the paycheck. I'm Jackie Simmons
and I am Rebecca Greenfield. The difference economically between having
a college degree and not having one is huge. For
full time, year round workers in their mid twenties and thirties,

(05:58):
having at least a bachelor's degree is worth an extra
twenty three thousand dollars a year in income, even taking
student debt into account. More education predicts higher incomes and
more wealth at every level. For one, it opens up
more better paying job opportunities. College graduates make more money
than people with a high school degree or even just

(06:18):
some college. People with a graduate degree make more money
than college grads. It's not just jobs. People with a
college or advanced degree are more likely to get benefits
like health insurance through their work, which adds an extra
layer of financial security. Experts also believe more education leads
to better financial decision making, so people are making more

(06:41):
money and they're making better choices with it. There's another
reason black families seek out a college education. My father
is very keenly aware of the difficulty of just simply
being black. You know, had an opportunity to to learn
to read, write, to do those things that will make
them competitive at least to fight back. He would fight back,

(07:01):
but you know, you could always be dismissed because you
couldn't do something or whatever it was. So he always
taught us it was important to get an education. That's
Shirley Webber. She's had a long career in California higher
education and politics. In January, she was sworn in as
a Secretary of State. She's a huge defender of affirmative
action and says it was critical to her success at

(07:24):
every point in her academic career. Without that extra step,
you know, I may would have done okay in life,
but I doubt if I would have if I would
have gotten a PhD by the time I was twenty six,
and I doubt if I would have been a professor
at the age I would have been struggling trying to
figure out what I was gonna do and how I
was going to do it. That extra opportunity helped to
get me to a level that I could actually excel,

(07:47):
you know, demonstrate that I could do those things despite
the fact coming from a very poor background. So my
first contact with affirmative action was really myself. Many black
professionals probably benefited from some kind of affirmative action. I
might have two. I graduated in the late eighties and
applied to a million schools, including some in California, and

(08:08):
was told race might be one factor that could help
me get a second look. I can't definitively say it
worked or not, but fast forward thirty years, I've definitely
had my share of professional success. Kelsey Butler is a
reporter at Bloomberg. She applied to college about fifteen years
after I did. Hey, Kelsey, Hi Jackie. So if I

(08:31):
understand you weren't very comfortable thinking of yourself as having
benefited from affirmative action, is that right? Yeah, that's true.
I mean it's complicated because you know, when I applied
to college in two thousand five, being black and Latina,
it might have been something that got me a second

(08:51):
look or even got me in the door with admissions officers.
I honestly have no idea, but I feel like since then,
in a lot of majority white spaces, you know, the
term affirmative action higher or you're here because of affirmative
action has been almost used as like a jab against me,

(09:11):
and it kind of sours you almost on the concept
I spent a lot of time while reporting this listening
to all the arguments against affirmative action, lots of tape,
lots of recordings. I thought a lot about the racist
roots of a lot of the arguments against affirmative action,

(09:33):
and also kind of made me think about, well, if
it didn't exist, then what really is there? You know,
the doors to a lot of institutions would be closed
to a lot of people. And is my discomfort you know,
someone saying something ignorant? It seems really small when you

(09:55):
think about it that way. One of the problems with
affirmative action does it gives certain people a leg up,
maybe without them even knowing. And some people think that's unfair,

(10:16):
even if it is creating a more level playing field.
But what happens when that leg up goes away? Does
that make things more fair? When California put a hard
stop to affirmative action with Prop two and nine, it
did do what connor Ley said, It's set up a
huge experiment. The state had three decades of strong affirmative

(10:37):
action measures and then all of a sudden it didn't.
We asked Kelsey to find some answers about what that
meant for black wealth. So Kelsey, Where do we start
well in terms of getting black students to college, Affirmative
action definitely worked. In five only four point seven percent

(10:57):
of African American adults had four more years of college
education according to the U S Census. It starts to
go up pretty quickly after that, especially when you consider
it typically takes at least four years to earn a
bachelor's By nineteen eighty, eight point four percent of Black
adults have a degree, almost double within fifteen years and

(11:19):
another fifteen years, so by a little more than thirteen
percent of Black adults have a four year degree or higher.
And that's before Prop. Two oh nine, Right, yeah, And
actually in California the numbers are slightly higher. By seventeen
point five percent of African Americans have a college degree

(11:39):
or higher. Another way to put it is, in about
thirty years, the number of Black adult in California with
a four year degree has gone from about one in
seventeen to better than one in six And this was
after some of the earliest affirmative action measures had been
watered down. What do you mean by water down? Well,
Originally some institutions used a straight quota system, setting aside

(12:02):
a certain number of seats for black and Hispanic students
until nineteen seventy seven and the U. S. Supreme Court
case known as the Baki case. Baki was Alan Baki,
a white man and an aspiring doctor. He wanted to
go to medical school at U C. Davis in VY three.
The school was new and the student body was overwhelmingly white,

(12:25):
so they decided to set aside seats for applicants they
called disadvantage, basically a euphemism for minorities. Baki had good
MCAT scores and his interviewer described him as a well
qualified candidate, but he didn't get in. He complained about
what he thought was a reverse discrimination and was encouraged
to apply again, and he was rejected a second time,

(12:48):
so he sued and his case made its way to
the Supreme Court. Six of the nine justices wrote opinions
in the case, and when you look at them, it's
really clear how divided they are. Some of um said
race based quotas were clearly unconstitutional. Others said it was
ridiculous to require schools to ignore racing admissions because of
how black people had been held back throughout US history,

(13:12):
and what was the controlling opinion Justice Lewis Powell tried
to bridge the divide. He said, if there's a quote
compelling state interests, race can be considered. In my view,
the only state interests that fairly may be viewed as
compelling on this record is the interest of a university
in a diverse student body. The court didn't strike down

(13:35):
all affirmative action. In fact, Powell quotes the admissions policy
at Harvard as an example of university that's doing it right.
He even attached a copy of the policy to his opinion.
But you see Davis was doing it wrong. Yeah, basically
because they'd set aside these rigid quotas. There were sixteen
seats out of a hundred that were essentially off limits
to white people. But you c Davis can rethink its policy,

(13:58):
which Powell practically exem to do. Yet the way is
open Todavis to adapt. The type of admissions program proved
to be successful in so many of the universities and
colleges of our country. So within ten years, basically quotas
are out. That's interesting because it seems like that's what

(14:19):
most people think of when they think of affirmative action. Yeah,
that's a popular misconception for most of its history. It's
not that at all, At least in college admissions. It's
much more flexible. Powell's decision does something else that's really important.
He basically wipes out Lyndon Johnson's rationale for affirmative action

(14:39):
undoing general racial discrimination or imbalance. That's not a compelling interest.
The only justification he allows is the diversity argument. So
colleges are allowed to consider race. Yes, but here's the difference.
Where before colleges were allowed to have quotas, now they're
allowed to consider race as one factor in pursuit of
diverse city and the student body. Most colleges worked within

(15:03):
these new parameters, adding race onto a bunch of other
admissions criteria. It was no longer the only factor, or
even the predominant one, but it was still very explicitly considered.
At California public schools, for example, black and Hispanic students
had lower s A T score and g p A
cutoffs for admissions. At places like Harvard, race is one

(15:25):
factor of many that the school considers when letting students in.
Black student enrollment drops for a bit, but then it
continues to pick up. Even at U C. Davis Medical School,
the overall minority student admit rate is higher five years
after BAKY than it was in the five years before.

(15:45):
By the case against affirmative action has a new twist.
There was the controversial idea of protecting white people from
the threat of reverse discrimination, but now it's also about
asserting that black people no longer need a leg up
or extra consideration of any kind. We've made it. That's
the argument connorally makes the support Prop to OH nine.

(16:08):
It's passage created an opportunity to find out whether he
was right. Maybe we black people didn't need affirmative action
after all. Since Prop TU and I took effect in
the nineties, researchers have been looking at these questions, and
enough time has passed if they think they have some answers.

(16:29):
Zachary Bloomer is a PhD candidate and economics at the
University of California, Berkeley. He looked at the impact of
the law on black and brown students. We can compare
the longer run outcomes of black and Latino university applicants
in the years just before when affirmative action was still
in place to the years just after when affirmative action

(16:52):
had ended. We're just gonna follow those cohorts of students
along over the next ten, fifteen, or even twenty years
and ask what happened to them as a result of
their more selective university enrollment under affirmative action. So that's
what Bloomer did. He looked at where ten thousand college
Albicans in California ended up without prop to OH nine,
both in college and in their careers. What he found

(17:15):
was pretty clear. Absent affirmative action, Black and Latino students
are less likely to earn college degrees. They're less likely
to earn graduate degrees, you know, following them another five
years into the future. They're less likely to earn degrees
in lucrative stem fields. This is science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics majors that are seen to provide long run wealth

(17:38):
returns to students without those degrees. African Americans and Latino
has made less money after affirmative action ends. The average
Black and Latino university applicant loses about five percent of
their wages. Bliemer looked at higher earners, people making about
a hundred thousand dollars in California by their mid thirties.
So let's put that into context. California in twenty four

(18:00):
team had about twenty thousand high earning Black and Latino
workers in the state around the ages of like thirty
to thirty four. How would that number of workers change
if affirmative action had stayed in place and so those
thirty to thirty four year olds had access to more

(18:20):
selective universities fifteen years ago when they went to college.
The answer is roughly three or four percent. So about
seven hundred or a thousand people working in California would
have been high earning if they had access to these
selective universities through affirmative action. So for African Americans and Latinos,
affirmative action had worked, they got more better academic credentials

(18:43):
and that translated into higher salaries. But what about other students.
One of the common arguments against affirmative action is that
it takes one of those slots away from someone quote
more deserving. Bloomers looked at that too. If that argument
was right, key theorized, then getting rid of affirmative action
would make their outcomes better. It didn't. Where did the

(19:07):
white and Asian students who would have gone to Berkeley?
Where did they go? Instead? Most of them go to
highly selective private universities of similar quality to UC Berkeley,
and so as a result, when you follow those students along,
providing them access to UC Berkeley actually gives them surprisingly
little in terms of longer run wage outcomes. That brings

(19:30):
us back to the wealth gap. What Bloomer's research suggests
is that part of the reason that affirmative action measures
don't harm white and Asian students is because they tend
to have other options. The reason they have those other
options is because they are, on average, coming from families
with greater wealth to begin with. Black and Hispanic students,

(19:52):
on the other hand, don't have as many of those
resources that limits their options college wise. They don't again,
on average, ridge have equal opportunities elsewhere. Right after Prop

(20:13):
two O nine, past college enrollment for black students in
California state schools dropped by about fifteen percent. Ever since,
California legislators and advocates have been trying to overturn it
or to find another way to strengthen affirmative action measures
in the state. Colleges have continued to prioritize diversity, so overall,
the number of black people getting four year degrees is

(20:34):
still rising. But not as fast as it was, and
it's never caught up to white people. Last year, as
the pandemic swept across the US and the Black Lives
Matter movement put civil rights front and center, California lawmakers
tried again. Shirley Webber led that fight. The ballot initiative
this time was called Prop sixteen. Okay, it's supposed been

(20:58):
cheered by somebody else's voice. That usual false to me,
and I just said, let's do it. You know, if
we're gonna do it, let's do it. The language was clunky.
It asked voters to repeal the amendment to the state
constitution that prohibited discrimination or preferential treatment on the basis
of race, but it had lots of support from across
the left. The founders of b LM, the a c

(21:20):
l U, and the California Teachers Union all lined up
behind it, and lots of celebrities too. Here's Eva DuVernay,
Tracy Ellis, Ross and Ray encouraging people to vote for
a Prop six team and the fight to dismantle systemic
racism is on the ballot in California. Voting yes on
Prop sixteen is our chance to right the wrongs of

(21:40):
the past. Voting yes on Prop sixteen is one way
to prove that black lives matter. I'm voting yes on Prop.
Sixteen because I wouldn't have gotten into college had it
not been for affirmative action, which means I wouldn't have
had the same access to opportunities and resources as my
wife peers. Voters in California, one of the most liberal

(22:02):
states in the US, went to the polls again on
affirmative action. It was a really big election, and the
state's progressive voters were excited either to boot out to
Donald Trump or to cast a vote for the first
woman of color as vice president following a summer of
Black Lives Matter protests. If there were ever a time
for affirmative action to come back, this would be it,

(22:26):
and Prop sixteen lost of people voted against it. In
nearly twenty five years since California ended affirmative action, the
policies had gotten even less popular. Surely, Weber thinks that
Prop sixteen made some people once again feel like they
might be on the losing end of a deal. If

(22:48):
I tell you that, you know we're looking at the universities,
then you know there's only so many seats in the university,
and will your kid get a seat? That's always a question.
And so those who thought they had a certain advantage
decided that it was too much to get, which is
not uncommon too much to get, So, you know, it's
one of the sad stories of the progressive California voting

(23:12):
for affirmative actually equal opportunity and access was a little
bit more people wanted to do, you know, a little
bit more. It may have cost them something. So even
if the advantage that white people might have overall is
unfair to begin with or evolved out of centuries of unfairness,
individuals don't see how that applies to them. Yeah, and

(23:32):
that perception of unfairness might be really hard to overcome.
The thing is, focusing on education might be the wrong
way to think about closing the racial wealth gap. For
a long time, economists and policymakers thought that closing the
education gap would eventually close the wealth gap. Better education,

(23:53):
better jobs, more money, and walla equality. But recently a
pair of e anymous at the St. Louis Federal Reserve
suggested closing the education gap wouldn't even be enough when
you look at wealth across racial groups. So For example,
just among people with college degrees or advanced degrees, there

(24:13):
are still huge gaps. The FED research shows that white
and Asian people on average basically benefit more from education
than Black and Latino people do at every level of education.
The wealth gap and the income gap persists. What's that work?
They say, are factors that you can't really see, discrimination

(24:35):
or other long term structural disadvantages. They might account for
as much as seventy of the wealth gap for black families.
What do they recommend instead, They don't really make recommendations,
not in that paper. What they do say is that
individual initiative or marginal policy changes might only chip away
at the gap. To really make significant progress, we need

(24:57):
quote more fundamental change general society. Maybe we should stop
fighting or small policy changes and push for bigger, more
radical things. Shirley Weber is doing just that. In October,
California passed into law another piece of legislation she wrote,
We'll just start here by signing this. With this signature,

(25:21):
Governor Newsome made history, making California the first state in
the country studying and developing proposals for potential reparations for
African Americans. That bill is focused on on African Americans,
not on equity and everybody else. You know, there's a
there's an awful lot old to group of people who've
been here four hundred years, came here before the Mayflower,

(25:42):
and still are at the very bottom of opportunity. Um. So,
whether it's manifests itself in reparations, whether it manifests itself
an affirmative action, remains to be seen. So what does
the bill say, They're going to study reparations. It's a
first step, and for people really interested in leveling the
playing field, so to speak, it's an important one. For

(26:13):
much of the past fifty years, no one took the
movement for reparations all that seriously, it's different now. There
are tons of questions about what real reparations would look
like in the US. Next week on the Paycheck, we
find out what happened when one affluenced Chicago suburb when
looking for answers, it is a way to repair egregious

(26:37):
injury and crimes against humanity against the black community, and
we need to acknowledge that. And so yes, it is reparations.
Let's not call it anything else. To make you feel
better about it, your role in it, or our inability
to address it before. Now let's call it what it is. Yeah,

(27:01):
thanks for listening to the Paycheck. If you like the show,
please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode was hosted by Me, Rebecca Greenfield and Me
Jackie Simmons. Today's episode was edited by Janet Paskin and
reported by Kelsey Butler. This episode was produced by Lindsay Cradowell.
We also had production help from Magnus Hendrickson and editing

(27:23):
help from Francesca Levi, Rackheeta Saluja, Jackie Simmons, and Me.
Our original music is by Leo Sigen. Francesca Levi is
Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. We'll see you next time.